Hieronymus Bosch organized moral cosmology through teeming visual accumulation—hundreds of figures ascending or descending through layered pictorial space. My practice extends this methodology into territory Bosch could not have imagined: cinema’s archived unconscious, the repository of visual formulas Hollywood deploys without acknowledging their repetition.

Heaven’s Gate (2020–2021) examines how spectacular cinema has systematically appropriated cosmological structures, revealing that the vertical journey from damnation to salvation remains entertainment’s preferred grammar for depicting transformation. The work samples eight hundred films, organizing fragments according to Dante’s seven levels of Purgatory. This structure emerged not from literary ambition but from observation: watching six films daily during pandemic isolation, I recognized that Hollywood deploys remarkably consistent visual formulas for temptation, industry, euphoria, and collapse. The same cloud formations signify transcendence across romantic comedies and science fiction epics. The same choreography—arms outstretched, face tilted upward—performs redemption whether the character is action hero or suburban mother. Individually, films obscure this consistency. Accumulated, the pattern becomes undeniable.

The methodology is archaeological saturation. Where Sherrie Levine and the Pictures Generation appropriated singular iconic images to question authorship and originality, I accumulate until individual sources dissolve and systematic grammar emerges. Characters stripped from narrative contexts function as surrogates for Hollywood’s ideological operations—their original meanings evacuated, replaced by the associative patterns they share with hundreds of apparently distinct entertainments. What remains is not story but syntax.

This investigation operates through spectacular means because no alternative exists. Guy Debord diagnosed the condition: spectacular culture saturates consciousness so completely that critique from exterior position becomes impossible. Analysis must proceed through the material it examines. Heaven’s Gate seduces with Hollywood’s visual density while exposing the limited vocabulary producing that seduction. The seven levels trace capitalism’s arc from temptation through productivity to euphoric overload to collapse. Standing before the work, I watch viewers undergo the same recognition I experienced assembling it—the dawning awareness that what they took for variety is repetition, what they took for storytelling is ideology.

Art-historically, this practice extends expanded cinema’s architectural turn while departing from its contemplative traditions. I deploy durational density to overwhelm individual recognition—the vertical scroll echoing smartphone feeds, endless input producing not contemplation but pattern saturation. Daniel Birnbaum identifies here a baroque logic of “expansion, unfolding, open-ended additions.” This formal excess is not decorative but epistemological: density produces knowledge unavailable to singular examination.

Heaven’s Gate exists across formats: VR immersion where viewers float through seven levels, gallery projection where the work towers above them, architectural installation at the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas where the building dissolves into content. Format agnosticism is methodological commitment. The grammar persists whether encountered in intimate headset or across sixteen thousand pixels of architectural surface. Scale changes; the pattern does not.

What emerges is recognition that cannot be reversed. Hollywood’s mythological production operates with industrial consistency across genres, decades, studios—the systematic architecture of contemporary belief, made visible through the only means available: saturation answering saturation.